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PONZI: Montecastro sentenced to 81 years, 8 months

Notorious Stonewood mortgage, securities scam, run like a Ponzi scheme by a cast of characters across the West, fleeced hundreds of victims of their homes, credit and retirement before the housing bust

PONZI: Montecastro sentenced to 81 years, 8 months

That was the courtroom scene as Hendrix Montecastro, a kingpin in the $142 million Stonewood mortgage and securities investment scam, heard Riverside County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Prevost impose an 81-year, eight-month term in state prison for his role in the Ponzi-style fraud that fleeced people in two states out of their homes and life savings.

Montecastro, who was convicted in March 2013 of several hundred felony counts in one of the countyâs longest white-collar criminal trials in recent history, said nothing as the sentences were read charge by charge.

Sentencing on Tuesday, Jan. 21, took more than an hour.

Montecastroâs mother, Helen Pedrino, 62, a Murrieta-area nurse who found investors as a master recruiter of unsuspecting church-goers, medical co-workers and attendees of get-rich seminars, was sentenced to seven years in state prison without a chance of probation.

The pair were credited for time already served in county jail, but Prevost also ordered them to pay more than $6 million in restitution to victims.

Some victims present in court trembled and dabbed at their eyes while others broke into smiles as the total time was tallied for the last of the co-conspirators in the Stonewood scam that spanned California and Arizona, and imploded when the housing bubble burst.

Victims, who had been directed to turn over control of their finances to the con artists, told Prevost that theyâve suffered horribly.

James LâHeureux, who was brought into the scheme that Montecastro and the key players ran with other lieutenants and that included a labyrinth of shell companies, told Prevost that his familyâs health and financial well-being were destroyed. Hundreds of âcore clientsâ were enticed to refinance their homes, draw down retirement and other savings, and max out credit cards for fraudulent investments on houses, hospitals, diamonds and Iraqi currency.

He told the judge his family survived on $200 a month to pay credit-card bills that the Ponzi-scheme had ratcheted up to $3,000 a month. Their home was lost to a short sale, he said. His wife now suffers from hypertension, and he is diabetic.

A son nearly died, he added, but for an airlift to a hospital when his pacemaker failed for their lack of knowledge that he needed to be near a landline for it to work. Their phone was unknowingly canceled to pay the bills.

Adding to their misery, LâHeureux said his wife was unable to afford plane tickets to the Philippines to attend her fatherâs funeral. At the same time, Montecastro and his clan posted pictures of their trips to Malta.

âI am pleading for a claw-back,â he told Prevost, as his legs trembled. âI want them to suffer as we have.â

Vicki Hightower, chief deputy district attorney, said she felt the sentence was well-reasoned and was just.

Deborah Weber said she felt some vindication. She is a victim who was among a group that nearly seven years ago urged authorities to investigate the fraud that pushed some 201 Riverside County homes into foreclosure and claimed hundreds of victims who werenât all brought into the case.

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